Biography: I am currently investigating people who lived in proximity to trade roads during times of conquest in the Nejapa region of Oaxaca, Mexico. My research spans the Late Postclassic period and the Colonial period and focuses on settlement patterns throughout the region.

Biography: Feray's research focuses on linguistic identity among first and second generation Turkish immigrant women in France. Especially, in the role of language in promoting greater integration within French society. Feray is also a steering committee member of the Many Faces of Human Trafficking Study Group at IU.

Topical Interests: My research interests take material culture as an entry point to understanding political economy and human-environment interactions in Africa. For my thesis, I worked with collections of political textiles at the Mathers Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. My dissertation research explores culture and technological change in the African oil palm belt.

Geographical Areas of Specialization: Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, and Diaspora Communities in the United States

Topical Interests:
Modernity, State and Minorities, Social Organization and Kinship, Political and Cultural Self-Representation, Ethnography, History of Anthropology, History and Historiography of Shi’a Islam and modern Iran and Afghanistan

Education:

Biography: My interest lies in the social and intellectual histories of Persianate societies of Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia from about early 18th century to the present. My thesis was concerned with the question of modernity and social transformation of Afghanistan within the context of the two world wars. My PhD dissertation research is tentatively titled, A History and Culture of Qizilbash: State and a Shi’a Minority in Kabul. It seeks to anthropologically understand state-formation from the perspective of an urban Shi’a group who once formed the military and bureaucratic backbone of the dynastic polities, and later held important civil and educational jobs while being discriminated against by the state on the basis of their religion and language. My research not only engages previously overlooked Qizilbash literature, sources and memories, which influenced the rise of a vibrant cosmopolitan culture that derived its identity from the Persian language, but it also deals with the contemporary academic debates over the identity and actual power of Qizilbash within the context of urbanization that took place in the second half of the 20th century. More broadly, my interest lies in what lessons could be learned from past political cultures that may help us understand the question of how to democratize the politics in non-industrial societies such as Afghanistan.

Topical Interests: My research focus on Identity, Mortuary Rituals, Cultural Heritage, Taphonomy and Trauma, Warfare and Ancestry Veneration in Mesoamerica and modern population, especially among Zapotecs and Mixtecs in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Education: Currently in the PhD program of Archaeology and Social Context concentration
M.A. in Biological Anthropology: 2012 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC)
B.A. in Physical Anthropology: 2010 at Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH), Mexico

Biography: Safak Kilictepe received her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology at Cumhuriyet University in Sivas, and completed her coursework in Physical Anthropology at Ankara University in Ankara, Turkey. She received the Republic of Turkey National Education Ministry Scholarship for her M.A. and Ph.D. degree studies in the United States. Her research has been supported by Social Science and Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, the Kinsey Institute Student Research Grant Program, and theSkomp Feasibility Fellowship. Her dissertation project focuses on the effects of the changing local and global dynamics on the bodies and lives of women in Turkey. Her research areas are medical anthropology, political anthropology, gender, reproduction, reproductive technologies, demography, citizenship, identity, and ethnicity/ race. She has also taken part in various projects, such as ancient DNA studies in Molecular Biology Laboratory, anthropometric evaluation of children (2000 school children were measured), determinants of oral health in primary school students (2000 children attended), and biocultural approach analysis.

Topical Interests:Archaeology, Archaeology in Social Context, Community organization and identity, Public outreach and education, Collaborative research methods

Education: Currently PhD candidate, Indiana University
2010, M.A. in Anthropology, Indiana University
2006, B.S. in Anthropology, Kent State University

Biography: My doctoral project is a study of community organization in the Postclassic period (A.D. 900-1521) of Oaxaca, Mexico. I am currently writing my dissertation titled “Material Markers of Community Identity in Postclassic Nejapa, Oaxaca, Mexico” under the direction of Dr. Stacie M. King. I am also involved in outreach and public education activities at IU, in Mexico, and with the Society for American Archaeology. As part of this work, I am currently serving as a member of the SAA Public Education Committee. For more information on my research, please visit: https://iub.academia.edu/ElizabethKonwest

Topical Interests: My research revolves around questions of identity, citizenship, knowledge, multiculturalism, and human rights. I am particularly interested in how these concepts are taken up and customized by indigenous peoples as a means to revitalize local practices and to renegotiate their relationship with the state. Geographically, my work is focused in Oaxaca, Mexico, although I’m interested in similar questions throughout Latin America.

Education: B.A. The Evergreen State College, Iberian and Latin American Studies. 2005
M.A. The University of Chicago: Latin American and Caribbean Studies. 2012

Topical Interests: Primate socioecology and behavior, physiology, endocrinology, immunology and parasitology. Specifically, Cari’s dissertation research has three primary goals: 1) explore the relationship between energy, protein, and mineral absorption and innate/adaptive immune function, 2) investigate the hormones that mediate this relationship [leptin, insulin, and cortisol], and 3) discover how grain in primate diets affects the digestibility of protein and minerals. She is currently working with the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

Biography: Ana is pursuing her PhD in Social-Cultural Anthropology with a minor in Food Studies. Her research focuses on the effects of the Bolsa Família program in the Brazilian Amazon, especially with regards to diet change.

Biography: I am currently investigating the ways quinoa producers and development practitioners in the Peruvian highlands negotiate changing agricultural production practices in the context of quinoa commercialization.

Biography: My research interests focus on language, identity and performativity, particularly the creative and strategic use of language in social interactions. My dissertation research will examine how language is used in bargaining negotiations in a Ghanaian market setting to achieve communicative goals, such as exercising agency, negotiating identity, and establishing solidarity.

Biography: I am currently analyzing faunal data from various contexts, including legacy collections and recently excavated materials from Angel Mounds. In the past I have also worked for the Illinois State Archaeological Survey in East St. Louis near Cahokia Mounds, The Jamestown Rediscovery Project in Virginia, and developed and taught a summer children's program on archaeology and museum display for The Sun Foundation. My research focuses on faunal provisioning during stress periods or periods of rapid change, and food culture change in contact periods. My M.A. thesis research was conducted through the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Archaeology Department, and focused on examining diversity in the urban meat diet of the mid-18th century. I also have work in press on the Starving Time of 1609-1610 at Jamestown.

Education: I am pursuing a PhD concentration in Archaeology and Social Context as well as a PhD minor in Native American and Indigenous Issues.

Biography: My dissertation research focuses on the impact of international aid in the management of Mongolian cultural heritage, as well as local and national strategies Mongolian non-profit organizations use to conceptualize Mongolian culture and achieve project success.

Geographical Areas of Specialization:
Eastern and Western Europe (particularly Romania and France)

Topical Interests: Post-socialist transformations, migration, labor, gender studies, globalization, citizenship, identity.For her dissertation Elena plans to research the topic of transnational migration between Eastern and Western Europe, with a focus on Romanian feminine labor migration after 1989, taking as a case study the migration to France (mainly to Bordeaux and Paris). She is interested in assessing the socio-cultural consequences of migration on a micro-level, i.e. Romanian families from rural communities, and in understanding the relation between gender and work in post-1989 migratory regimes.

Topical Interests: Evolutionary endocrinology, life history theory, human disease ecology. For his dissertation he plans to research the functional significance of DHEA/S variation as it relates to immunocompetence and energetic status.

Topical Interests: My research focuses on the use of faunal and botanical resources both as subsistence and within iconography to indicate patterns of community discourse that challenge current understandings of social complexity in North America.

Topical Interests: Eric’s research interests include infectious diseases, immunology, psychoneuroimmunology, evolutionary medicine, and the co-evolution of humans and pathogens, and human disease ecology.
Specifically he is interested in the extent to which infectious diseases are able to affect human behavior and mood, subsequent physiological changes, and whether these have any implications for disease transmission and behavior/mood disorders.

Topical Interests: My dissertation is examining the effect that dry, highly heterogeneous habitats have on male chimpanzee patterns of ranging and affiliation as well as inter-community relations. I am studying this in a semi-habituated community of chimpanzees, and therefore employing molecular ecology as an indirect test for patterns of association, ranging, and kinship. Finally, I am also interested in adding stable isotope analysis to indirectly analyze diet in this same population at the Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve in western Uganda.

Geographical Areas of Specialization:
Midwest North America, in particular Indiana and Illinois

Topical Interests: My research interests are in how Type 2 diabetes affects bones. This includes the influences for Type 2 diabetes, such as prehistoric diet and how it has changed through time in Midwest North America, from Archaic through Mississippian time periods, as well as status considerations.

Biography: I am a dual Ph.D. student in Central Eurasian Studies and Anthropology with a specific focus on the history of the Turkic speakers in Inner Asia and northwestern China from 6th to 13th centuries. I'm trying to understand the very basic motives of political authority, legitimacy and "medieval international relations" in the early Inner Asia through reading the material culture represented in the mortuary monuments.

Master degree in Ethnology and Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, 2014.

Licence of Philosophy and licence of History from the Sorbonne, Paris IV (2011)

Biography: Thierry’s research focuses on the representation of the body in the Northern Paiute oral tradition. He identifies emic and meaningful actions in a system of representation by articulating subsistence practices, rituals and myths.

Topical Interests: Evolutionary endocrinology, life history theory, evolutionary developmental biology, and exercise physiology. Specifically, he is interested in the male life history tradeoff between reproductive effort and survivorship and the role testosterone plays in modulating this tradeoff through its interaction with both the reproductive and immune systems.